In recent years, a large number of handheld wireless text messaging devices, which are also known as “interactive pagers”, have been brought to market. These interactive pagers may be used to transmit and/or receive text messages that are displayed to a user on a display screen. Examples of devices that include a wireless text messaging capability are paging devices that include a reply capability, wireless e-mail devices such as the Blackberry devices marketed by Research in Motion Limited, various personal data assistants such as devices that use the Palm operating system and the Windows Pocket PC operating system and cellular telephones that include text messaging capabilities.
The above-mentioned interactive pagers use one or more of a wide variety of input devices for inputting text messages into the device. For instance, with cellular telephones, the telephone keypad typically is used to “type” in a text message. Other devices such as the Blackberry devices include an integrated keyboard which may be used to type in a text message, and with other devices the text message may be typed into a computer and then downloaded to the interactive pager. Additionally, many devices such as Personal Data Assistants include on-screen keyboards, external keyboards and/or handwriting recognition capabilities that allow a user to use a stylus to handwrite the text message on a screen, touchpad or the like. Many interactive pagers include more than one of the representative input devices discussed above and/or other input devices that are known in the art
Each of the above-mentioned input devices may have its own limitations. For instance, because most interactive pagers are relatively small, the keyboards and/or keypads provided on such devices typically have relatively small keys or “buttons.” These buttons may be more difficult to use than, for example, the keys on a standard computer keyboard. Additionally, many input devices include only a twelve button numeric keypad which is used to input the text messages. Because a separate button is not provided for each possible alpha-numeric entry, such keypads are also typically more difficult to use than a standard computer keyboard. These small size interactive pagers may use relatively small display screens which may be difficult to read and/or may use extensive scrolling to read longer messages.